I’ve sort of been the Herald’s designated go-to guy to cover high school boys soccer playoffs since arriving in 2003, and given Snohomish High School’s perennial success, it means I’ve covered the Panthers more times than I can remember.
Anyway, here’s a column about how I watched Snohomish alum Blake Crutchfield alter the Washington prep soccer landscape. In all honesty this story is a year late, but I wasn’t a columnist a year ago, so I was only able to get to it now.
But this got me to thinking about more than just high school soccer. Crutchfield’s long throw-ins were a game changer. But for some reason I don’t see many teams at the professional level doing the same. Why is that? It seems to me that if the tactic works at the prep level, it should have similar success at the pro level, and if high school kids are strong enough to throw the ball into the goal mouth, grown men should be strong enough as well. With so much more at stake in the pros I would think teams would be all over this, as they’d do just about anything to give themselves more of an edge.
I don’t have the answer to this question. For all I know there’s a perfectly logical reason why we don’t see more long throw-ins in the pros. But it does make me wonder.
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